Swan around and swan song
SWAN (ABOUT/AROUND/OFF), v. A friend asked about the origin of this expression a couple weeks ago, and here’s what I’ve found. It seems to be primarily British, first used at the end of the nineteenth century. Initially, it meant moving like a swan—swimming, gliding. Because swans seem to move so effortlessly, “swan around” took on a connotation of carefree movement. In an unexpected turn for an expression about birds and grace and aimlessness, multiple sources mentioned an increase in usage during WWII, citing this one particular example about tanks, which as we all know are very similar to swans:
Following their advance in the morning and early afternoon on Monday, the enemy began to show signs of disturbance at not having encountered our main tank force. Breaking up his armour into comparatively small groups of 10 or 20 or even five or six tanks, he began “swanning about”, feeling north, north-west and east for them.
Daily Telegraph, 3 Sep. 1942. (truncated version in the OED entry, plus source, source)
It makes a kind of sense to me to imagine a tank “swanning.” Have you seen swans? They’re basically dinosaurs. Tanks with feathers. Of course they’re carefree and aimless. Their beaks are sharp and their necks are an offensively long rope of muscle and they can go wherever they want.
The Threatened Swan, Jan Asselijn, 1650, source. This is a “fuck around and find out” pose if I’ve ever seen one.
Humans can swan around without actually going anywhere in contemporary usage. Not just because we’re all stuck at home, I mean—the idea of motion is no longer as important to this expression as the idea of being irresponsible or maybe even ostentatious (a newer connotation).
At this point I started thinking about the nature of swanness, and why we call them swans anyway, and it turns out you can track our English word for this animal all the way back to a Proto-Indo-European root, *swen-, that means “to make sound.” Its Germanic language descendants are all related to sound and singing and swans. That’s weird as hell. Think of all the birds you could potentially name “the musical one.” Swans don’t rank anywhere near the top of that list. Not to be rude to swans, who I both respect and fear, but they’re about as melodious as tanks.
The idea of a swan making music is powerful, though, because we also have the expression “swan song,” a beautiful final performance. There is a folkloric belief, going all the way back to ancient Greece, that swans sing a beautiful song before they die. (Interestingly, the ancient Greek word for “swan,” kúknos, doesn’t come from that PIE root about making sound. It might come from a PIE root meaning “white” or it might be onomatopoeic based on swan noises.)
I asked a classicist friend—a different one from the one who helped me last week, not to brag but I’m friends with several classicists—about Greeks and swans, and she wrote back that there is a mention of swans in the play she’s currently translating, Aristophanes’ comedy Frogs, titled after its chorus of frogs. The chorus is referred to as “βατράχων κύκνων θαυμαστά, ‘marvels of the swan-frogs (or frog-swans)’ (line 207 of the Greek)” and my friend kindly shared her notes on this passage with me. The juxtaposition of frogs and swans is “a contradiction, as swans were considered superb singers and frogs ugly croakers,” according to W.B. Stanford’s edition of Frogs. A couple of other scholars, Alan H. Sommerstein and Kenneth Dover, remark about this same passage that swan music is for the gods, not for human ears.
There are lots of notable references to swan songs, like an Aeschylus line about “having sung her own dirge like the dying swan” (Agamemnon 1445), and my friend also pointed me toward what Socrates has to say about swan songs in Plato’s Phaedo, a dialogue on the immortality of the soul. For context, Socrates is facing down his own execution when he says this part about swans:
For [swans], when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away to the god whose ministers they are. But men, because they are themselves afraid of death, slanderously affirm of the swans that they sing a lament at the last, not considering that no bird sings when cold, or hungry, or in pain, not even the nightingale, nor the swallow, nor yet the hoopoe; which are said indeed to tune a lay of sorrow, although I do not believe this to be true of them any more than of the swans. But because they are sacred to Apollo and have the gift of prophecy and anticipate the good things of another world, therefore they sing and rejoice in that day more than they ever did before. And I, too, believing myself to be the consecrated servant of the same God, and the fellow servant of the swans, and thinking that I have received from my master gifts of prophecy which are not inferior to theirs, would not go out of life less merrily than the swans.
Swans are super chill about dying. They just swan right off into the great beyond.
Swan, Rush, and Iris wallpaper, Walter Crane, 1875, source. Those are the faces of birds who don’t fear death.
In things that are small-r romance adjacent, I read Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Will and Temper, which is a fantasy novel that takes The Picture of Dorian Gray (which I read at the beginning of this year) as a starting point and adds lesbians and sword fights. An excellent combination. Every story ever told could be improved by the addition of lesbians and sword fights. If you were engineering a book in a lab specifically so that I would love it, you’d come up with something like this. It even has an embedded text (a book called On the Summoning of Demons) that characters read and quote from. There’s a scene where the characters go to the National Gallery to look at paintings, and the whole thing is delightful. Also, if you’re ever on the hunt for books with compelling, complex sibling relationships, this is a good one. And the lesbians do get their Happily Ever After, so even though there’s a lot happening in this novel that’s more adventure than romance, I’m including it in this section. Content warnings: violence, murder, references to addiction.
I also reread Sarah Rees Brennan’s fantastic, funny, poignant young adult fantasy In Other Lands, which is a version of the “normal-world teen goes off to a magical land for school” subgenre about trying to create peace through diplomacy while you figure out if your crush likes you back. Elliot, the protagonist, is a prickly smartass bisexual teen who feels friendless and unloved and always says the wrong thing, and I spent the whole book internally screaming at everyone else to please give this poor kid a hug and at Elliot to stop being so mean. I love him. I love this book. It’s long and I wish it were longer. I also wish it had some trans characters, (1) because I like to see trans characters in fiction and (2) because this book makes a lot of commentary about gender roles and stereotypes that would be enriched by the inclusion of trans characters and (3) because it feels like a very particular lack when an imaginary world has elves and mermaids and harpies and gays and lesbians and bisexuals but no trans people. Content warnings: emotional abuse/neglect/abandonment by parents, violence, death, some mentions of homophobia and biphobia.
Anyway, since I was wishing for YA fantasy with trans characters, I bought Aiden Thomas’s Cemetery Boys to read soon because it looks great.
In good things I read on the internet this week, Alyssa Cole wrote an essay called I’m a Romance Novelist Who Writes About Politics—And I Won’t “Stay In My Lane” about romance novels, the false notion of “apolitical fantasy fluff,” and her part in the Romancing the Runoff fundraising effort. I went looking for a line to highlight in this essay and ending up highlighting almost the whole thing, so instead I’ll heartily recommend clicking the link and reading it.
On one last note, I’m excited to be one of the judges in the 2021 Tournament of Books. I can’t say more now, but when the Tournament starts, I will let you all know.
I hope you get to swan around at home this week. See you next Sunday!
